In my first few days being a part of the conglomerate that is "The Tomato", Jim had to put in a celebrity appearance with Inman in San Francisco and I was left behind to slave away, lol, and return phone calls to folks who had expressed interest in what the tomato has to offer or had questions.  Honestly, this is really the fun part and I enjoy it much.

One call, in particular, really struck a chord with me as I had the same epiphany when I had my own real estate website with a company, called property minder, that will remain nameless.  A couple of things disturbed me.

1. They were always pushing me toward PPC (pay per click) advertising and

2. My website had zero traffic.

When I got my first website I thought, "hey, I'm mr. internet!"  Nothing could've been further from the truth however I continued to delude myself into thinking that I was "the eRealtor".  While being self delusional can be entertaining, no traffic means no business from the internet, where upwards of 80% of buyers first begin their home search. (I've always said that this number should be something like 95% of all buyers with computers start their searches here)  Not only that, my website was like every other website..a shell of what it could be, an enigma to all who viewed it and essentially useless as a lead generation tool.  My lack of knowledge was my downfall.  Being an enigma on the internet is, well, not a good thing.

Back to my call! The lady I spoke with in Atlanta is very knowledgeable about her business and very internet savvy.  She has a blog already and she couldn't understand why, when she was located on page 1 of Google, she wasn't receiving any benefit from it.

She mentioned that the keyword phrase she was optimized under was "expired listings in atlanta".  That brought her up to page 1.  Hmmm...that's great but there is one strategic issue at large here.  

That keyword phrase is a phrase that someone, say a buyer, wouldn't typically search under.  If it were, there would be leads aplenty.  When I thought about this, that seemed to be a keyword phrase that Realtors would search under and not one that Buyers would search under.  A Realtor who visits your site, while it can happen, seldom turns into a sale.  Correct me if I'm off base here.

The beauty of the blogosphere is that with a little education about how this all works, you can optimize your site for the search terms that your target audience is looking for.  As well, if you put some keywords through a "KEI", keyword effectiveness index, you  may be able to find keyword phrases that are highly searched but aren't highly competitive in your market.  

High organic rankings will do you a world of good only if the keyword term you're found under is relevant to your target market. 

Fast Fact:

In a Penn St. study done in 2005, they found that 80% of all first clicks went to the "organic" search results while only 6% went to the sponsored links or PPC ads.  The first question I had was, "what happened to the other 14%?" lol